Sanders Took Heat From The Anti-War Left Over Gulf War, Yugoslavia Intervention

In the Democratic presidential primary race, Bernie Sanders is most commonly viewed as the anti-war candidate, but not everyone on the left feels that way. Peace movement activists in Vermont have accused Sanders of supporting the build-up to the 1990 Persian Gulf War, despite his passionate denunciations of the invasion on the House floor.

In a 1999 essay, former U.S. Army Security Agency signal analyst Will Miller wrote, “Bernie became an imperialist to get elected in 1990.” Sanders started speaking out against the intervention on the House floor in January 1991.

Sanders lost to the Republican candidate in the 1988 race to become U.S. representative from Vermont’s at-large district, but beat incumbent Peter Smith in 1990 and Democratic candidate Delores Sandoval.

“In August, 1990 — after the Bush administration enticed Iraq into invading Kuwait — Sanders said he wasn’t ‘going to let some damn war cost him the election,’ according to a staff member who was present at the time,” wrote Miller, who later became a philosophy professor at the University of Vermont. “So Sanders backed the buildup in the Persian Gulf and dumped on the left anti-imperialist peace movement, singling out his former allies like Dave Dellinger for public criticism.”

The essay, called “Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week,” is hosted at the website for the Liberty Union Party. It bears no date when it was added to the party’s website, but it appears to have been posted in the summer of 2014, since another essay called “Bomber Bernie can’t take the heat”, was published shortly after, as the html addresses reveal.

Sanders began his political career in the early 1970s as a member of the Liberty Union Party, but quit the party six years later because he said it was not “a serious political party.”

Instead of military intervention, Sanders backed economic sanctions on Iraq, which writer Paul Street claimed in 2015 helped cause the death of “more than a million Iraqi citizens.”

“Sanders responded by drifting right and cutting a deal with the Vermont Democrats: the party would permit no serious candidate to run against him while he blocked serious third party formation in Vermont and adopted positions in line with the national corporate war Democrats,” Street wrote.

Activist Ashley Smith, wrote in 2006 that, “Despite his own claims, Sanders has not been an antiwar leader. Ever since he won election to the House, he has taken either equivocal positions on U.S. wars or outright supported them.”

She complained about his “hawkish positions — especially his decision to support Bill Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo War”; his “fail[ure] to join the sole Democrat, Barbara Lee, to vote against Congress’ resolution that gave George Bush a blank check to launch war on any country he deemed connected to the September 11 attacks”; “vote[s] for appropriations bills to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan”; and how Sanders “supported pro-war measures – such as a March 21, 2003, resolution stating, ‘Congress expresses the unequivocal support and appreciation of the nation to the President as Commander-in-Chief for his firm leadership and decisive action in the conduct of military operations in Iraq as part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism.'”

Not long after the arrests, a key Bernie Sanders staffer quit, because of the senator’s reluctant support for NATO’s 1999 bombings in Yugoslavia.

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“It was your vote in support of this resolution that precipitated my decision that my conscience required me to resign from your staff,” Sanders staff policy analyst Jeremy Brecher stated in his resignation letter, AlterNet noted last May. Brecher asked, “Is there a moral limit to the military violence you are willing to participate in or support?”

Other activists also staged a sit-in in Sanders’ Vermont office over the Yugoslavia intervention.